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This paper aims to extend some of the theoretical propositions of Michael Power’s (1997) audit society thesis by exploring the capacity of organisations to push back against external accountability pressures. The paper positions the literature on non-governmental organisation (NGO) accounting and accountability as a “case study” against which the notion of the audit society is put to the test.

A qualitative meta-synthesis of the accounting literature is used to analyse how NGOs have responded to audit society pressures – most notably funder pressures to adopt formalised accountability mechanisms. The different responses of NGOs to funder accountability demands are analysed using Christine Oliver’s (1991) typology of strategic responses to institutional processes.

This review of the accounting literature unveils that NGOs can adopt a range of strategic responses to funder accountability pressures that vary from passive conformity to proactive manipulation. The findings confirm that NGOs often perceive acquiescence to funder accountability demands as necessary to ensure organisational survival. Yet, the author also found that NGO resistance to funder accountability pressures is more common than previously assumed. Five dominant forms of “accountability resistances” emerged from the analysis: evading accountability, disguising accountability, shielding accountability, negotiating accountability and shaping accountability.

By conducting a qualitative meta-synthesis of the accounting literature, the author was able to integrate the findings of prior research on NGO resistance to funder accountability demands, guide future research and extend Michael Power’s (1997) work by developing a more nuanced understanding of how organisations respond to external accountability pressures.

The paper examines the content moderation practices and related public disclosures of the World's most popular social media organizations (SMOs). It seeks to understand how content moderation operates as a process of accountability to shape and inform how users (inter)act on social media and how SMOs account for these practices.

Content analysis of the content moderation practices for selected SMOs was conducted using a range of publicly available data. Drawing on seminal accountability studies and the concepts of hierarchical and holistic accountability, the authors investigate the design and appearance of the systems of accountability that seek to guide how users create and share content on social media.

The paper unpacks the four-stage process of content moderation enacted by the World's largest SMOs. The findings suggest that while social media accountability may allow SMOs to control the content shared on their platforms, it may struggle to condition user behavior. This argument is built around the limitations the authors found in the way performance expectations are communicated to users, the nature of the dialogue that manifests between SMOs and users who are “held to account”, and the metrics drawn upon to determine the effectiveness of SMOs content moderation activities.

This is the first paper to examine the content moderation practices of the World's largest SMOs. Doing so extends understanding of the forms of accountability that function in the digital space. Crucial future research opportunities are highlighted to provoke and guide debate in this research area of escalating importance.

This study examines how assurors make sense of sustainability assurance (SA) work and how interactions with assurance team members and clients shape assurors’ sensemaking and their actual SA work.

To obtain detailed accounts of how SA work occurs on the ground, this study explores three SA engagements by interviewing the main actors involved, both at the client firms and at their Big Four assurance providers.

Individual assurors’ (i.e. partners and other team members) sensemaking of SA work results in the crafting of their logics of action (LoAs), that is, their meanings about the objectives of SA work and how to conduct it. Without organizational socialization, team members may not arrive at shared meanings and deviate from the team-wide assurance approach. To fulfill their objectives for SA work, assurors may engage in socialization with clients or assume a temporary role. Yet, the role negotiations taking place in the shadows of the scope negotiations determine their default role during the engagement.

Two options are available to help SA statement users gauge the relevance of SA work: either displaying the SA work performed or making it more uniform.

This study theoretically grounds how assurors make sense of SA work and documents how (the lack of) professional socialization, organizational socialization and socialization of frequent interaction partners at the client shape actual SA work. Thereby, it unravels the SA work concealed behind SA statements.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a theoretically informed analysis of the evolution of environmental management accounting (EMA) and social and environmental reporting (SER), and the accompanying development of a sustainability programme, in a large family-owned, unlisted corporation.

A longitudinal case study based on semi-structured interviews and documentary data was conducted. The main periods of fieldwork were carried out in 2007 and between 2010 and 2012. Sustainability reports were collected until 2019 when SER appeared to cease. The case analysis draws on the concepts of organisational identity (OI) and internal legitimacy (IL) to examine the decision-making and actions of a range of key organisational actors as they engage with EMA and SER.

The study demonstrates that a gap between an organisation’s identity claims (“who we are”) and its enacted identity (“what we do”) can enable the adoption of constitutive, performative and representational EMA and SER. It illuminates the nature of the role of key actors and organisational dynamics, in the form of OI and IL, in adapting these practices. It also demonstrates that, in giving meaning to the concept of sustainability, organisational actors can draw on their organisation’s identity and construct the comprehensibility of an organisational sustainability programme.

More empirical work is needed to examine the applicability of OI and IL to other settings. It would also be beneficial to examine the potential for OI work to allow organisations to change and reinvent themselves in response to the evermore pressing environmental crisis and the role, if any, of EMA in this process.

The study enriches our understanding of why and how EMA and SER evolve by demonstrating that paying attention to OI and IL can provide further insight into the decision-making and actions of organisational members as they recognise, evaluate, support and cease these practices.

This paper aims to bring to the fore some conditions of possibility surrounding the audit society thesis that might have contributed to construct a sense of distinctiveness around it, thereby facilitating its spread and travel in the accounting research community (and beyond) as a meaningful epistemological agenda.

My argument is that the aura of distinctiveness surrounding the audit society thesis as a noteworthy epistemological agenda relates to outsider influences, concept plasticity, and in-depth persuasiveness. I discuss these three features of distinctiveness through excerpts from the book and my own interpretations, the whole analytic process being circumscribed by a disciplined imagination exercise (Weick, 1989).

While the webs of unpredictability surrounding social life necessarily influenced the travel of the audit society thesis in academia, it seems to me that the thesis’ journey may have been helped by the author’s outsider status, the malleability of the thesis’ key concepts, and the medium (as a book) through which the thesis was articulated (which provided a persuasive platform to underline and demonstrate the depth of the argument).

In an age where journal rankings abound, the audit society thesis constitutes a telling demonstration that one can have a meaningful impact in setting an epistemological agenda and consolidate her/his scholarly reputation through the publication of a scholarly book.

The authors examine how performance measurement systems (PMSs) and academic agency influence the meaning of research quality in practice. The worries are that the notion of research quality is becoming too simplistically and narrowly determined by research quality's measurable proxies and that academics, especially manager-academics, do not sufficiently realise this risk. Whilst prior literature has covered the effects of performance measurement in the university sector broadly and how PMSs are mobilised locally, there is only little understanding of whether and how PMSs affect the meaning of research quality in practice.

The study is designed as a comparative case study of two university faculties in Finland. The role of conceptual analysis plays a notable role in the study, too.

The authors find that manager-academics of the two examined faculties have rather similar conceptual understandings of research quality. However, there were differences in the degree of slippage between the “espoused-meaning” of research quality and “meaning-in-practice” of research quality. The authors traced these differences to how the local PMS and manager-academics’ agency relate to one another within the context of increasing global and national performance pressures. The authors developed a tentative framework for the various “styles of agency”. This suggests how the relationship between the local PMS and manager-academics’ exerted agency shapes the “degrees of freedom” of the meaning of research quality in practice.

Given that research quality lies at the heart of academic work, the authors' paper indicates that exploring the three matters – performance measurement, the agency of manager-academics and the meaning of research quality in practice – in combination is crucial for the sustainability of the academe. The authors contribute to the literature by detailing the way in which local PMS and manager-academics' agency have material impacts on what research quality means in practice. The authors conclude by highlighting the pressing need for manager-academics to exercise the agency in efforts to safeguard a broad and pluralistic understanding of research quality in practice.